ABSTRACT
A visit to the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel in November 2008 both deepened and complicated this view. The report, by the pro-Israeli, pro-Zionist New Israel Fund, suggests an attitude of— perhaps necessary— indifference to the villagers’ fate among those carrying out the destruction. There are indeed grounds for arguing that in Western public discourse the opinions and rights of the Palestinians have not been granted parity with those of the Israelis. This chapter begins by arguing that psychoanalytic theories concerning the unconscious element in inter-communal strife are a useful starting point in considering the underlying reasons for this. It suggests an application of these theories to consider the legacy of history on the development of dynamic features in the collective psychic life of Western and Israeli societies. After 1967, the State increasingly identified itself with the victims of Nazism: there is now an active socialization of Israeli youth into an identity as survivors of the Holocaust.
